The Cascade is a blog about the past, present, and future of CSS.

Howdy—Robin Rendle here.

This blog keeps me in the loop with everything that’s possible with CSS lately but it’s also a reminder to celebrate the people doing the hard work building stuff for the web.

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Charm

Since I’ve been working as a designer for a few years now, I’ve felt like I needed to upgrade my command line chops. So I downloaded Warp and fell down a big rabbit hole of futzing and playing with everything I’d missed or ignored over the years.

This led me to Charm, a group of folks who make super interesting command line tools. They make stuff like VHS which helps you create GIFs of your terminal, or Pop that lets you send email via the command line. Bubbles is neat too, it’s a set of components for building your own CLI tools.

The one thing that I love about Charm is that they clearly spend an awful lot of time polishing their work. From the website to the README, everything is clear and everything shines with thoughtfulness. I especially loved this post about their process by Christian Rocha:

The README is critically important to the success of an open source product. It’s often a developer’s first point of contact with a project and the place where a developer will, in a matter of seconds, judge whether the project worthy of further consideration. With this in mind, put a lot of effort into README design, optimizing for strong first impressions.

Our strategy is to simply follow the age-old rule of advertising: showing the product. Good products, when presented correctly, will sell themselves, which is why we spend spend so much time on user experience and attention to detail.